Excerpt from Today's Reading:
"The afflicted and the needy seek water in vain,
    their tongues are parched with thirst.
I, the LORD, will answer them;
    I, the God of Israel, will not forsake them."
Isaiah 41:17

Isaiah 41, where our first reading comes from today, is written most likely at the end of Israel’s Babylonian Exile. The author’s prophecy is likely therefore spoken to an Israel in transition: they are getting ready to return to their homeland after half a century—a homeland that only the oldest of their community would remember.

This Second Isaiah, as the author of Isaiah 40-55 is often called, seeks to assure a worried and anxious Israel; a nation that is unsure of what they will find in the land they were expelled from. He presents for them the image of a God who steadies them, who fills the desert with water and seeks to make their people into a sharp, new threshing sledge: a tool by which wheat was separated from the chaff—the unusable parts of the plant—during harvest. Do not worry, Isaiah’s prophecy decrees, God will guide us back to the land of promise, the land we were forced to leave, and God will make it verdant and full of life. You will be the tool with which the world’s wheat is harvested. 

The holidays can be a particularly difficult time for many LGBTQ people. We, like Israel, are often forced to leave home; to leave the land of our parents and to consider that we may never return. Sometimes this is physical: many of us simply cannot go to the places where we grew up. Sometimes this is more metaphorical: while we may be able to go home safely in a physical sense, we still know that the places our parents inhabited—perhaps the churches of our youth, or simply the doctrines we received as children—are no longer a place we can call “home”.

As Jesus proclaims that Isaiah’s prophecy from chapter 40 is fulfilled in John—he is the one who calls “prepare the way for the Lord”, the return of Elijah—he announces that this time of verdant desert is at hand. But what desert? What exile is Israel returning from?

Indeed: what exile are we returning from? What desert of ours does Jesus plan to make green? I think so often this time of year we as a community focus on the exile we have been forced into. But I wonder what life, what joy, what green pastures do Isaiah and Jesus prophesy for us? As we journey our way through Advent this year, it is these questions that I sit with. We are heirs to the promise of Israel and we hold this prophecy to be true: God steadies our right hand and they will set in the dry places great trees to take root, the wood from which the future of our Church will be made. We LGBTQ Catholics are Israel returning from exile: let us take hope in the promise that a new kingdom is at hand. 

Whoever has ears ought to hear.

Alden G.